Retirement's great! It’s Monday morning again, the sun’s shining again and once again it is good to see everyone off to work. And even better, following a lot of hard work during last week and over the weekend all essential decorating is complete with eight working days to go before Alex and the family arrive here for the summer. Just a kitchen to fit now and then floor tiles to lay in the kitchen and breakfast room, so no problem there then.


But things never quite go to plan. I decide to replace the tiles on the kitchen window sill with a window board and in taking off the tiles brought off large chunks of plaster. The window sill is now down to bricks and the plaster on the wall below the window is crumbling. The more I touch it the worse it gets so I leave that and decide to move two electrical sockets.


The kitchen wall with the sockets is part of the original cottage so has been there since before the year 1792. There is no cavity and the mortar is quite soft so in knocking out bricks in the kitchen to fit the socket I knock right through and now have an unwanted hole in the kitchen wall. I put the bricks back and decide to leave the sockets where they are.


So I spent all of Saturday morning making the kitchen worse than it was before. A call to the kitchen fitters was made and they said ‘leave it to us’. That’s a relief.


But on a happier note, Christine has been dressing the "Outside Room" again and it now looks excellent as well as complete. That is before Saturday afternoon. Having given up on the kitchen I am looking round for the next job and decide to alter the gate into the Outside Room, I thought it was too high and decided to cut it down a little. The first step is to remove the top bar from the gate surround. I open the gate put my steps underneath the top bar and hit under the bar with a large hammer. I miss the bar and, unbalanced, fell against the gate surrounds. Thirteen stones leaning on the post suddenly pull it from its fixing into the house wall and it comes away with two bricks attached. This is the same wall I had previously knocked a hole through for the sockets. Another patch in the wall is now required. I decide I've had enough and go indoors to watch the World Cup.


We now have a kitchen that needs more work than before and an Outside Room with no gate. Christine has gone back to her sewing machine to do something useful like making curtains whilst I have decided I need a rest. I am taking time out to play golf with ex-colleagues tomorrow and hopefully after that I will be back to being useful again.